11 Plus Creative Writing: 14 Ways to Encourage Your Child to Write Creatively – Part 2

14 ways to encourage your child to write creatively - Part 2/2

If you saw the first post of this series, then you’ll know the first seven ways you can encourage your child to write creatively. Here are the last seven tools to include in your child’s creative writing toolkit.

8. Diary and Journal Writing

Getting your child into the habit of writing in a journal or ‘dear diary’ entries is one way to help your child build their documenting and reporting skills. In getting used to recounting their day and remembering to include the details, they are continually sharpening their creative recall skills and their ability to express their emotions which can be quite cathartic.

Ideas

9. Gratitude Journal or Notes

Whether young or old, developing the habit of being grateful helps with mindfulness and cultivating a positive mindset.

10. Encourage Your Child to Read Widely

Amazed child reading fashion magazine

It’s often said that great writers are often readers, too, and in developing your child’s creative writing tendencies, reading different kinds of materials used in the real world is useful!

Newspapers, magazines, leaflets, etc. reading can come from more than just books. Let your child get their hands on these materials to see real-life examples of how writing is used.

11 Plus Creative Writing: 14 Ways to Encourage Your Child to Write Creatively - Part 2

11. Writing Challenges

This can be for a week, three days, or a whole month where you’ll choose a particular theme or topic to focus on and encourage them to write different pieces of writing focusing on this. This helps with building their confidence when it comes to tackling different topics.

12. Music-Inspired Writing

Why not play some music to get their creative juices flowing? Be it some jazz, classical, dance or gospel music, choose a track and use it to lead their story writing trail! This is a fun and straightforward way to inspire your child to write a scene based on the music.

13. Keep an ideas Jar

Write several one-liners or sentence starters and store them in a jar – it takes the formality out of creating ideas and makes it much more fun. You can look up some examples for inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram. Place the ideas in a jar and encourage your child to select one or two, at random, to write a story about.

14. Writing a Poem

Similar to helping your child write in different styles, poetry is one of the types of writing that many children dread. However, finding a way to include this in their creative writing practice into their routine might help them overcome their fear or dislike of this genre of writing. If you set the challenge for them to write a poem once a month, they will gradually build their confidence and, hopefully, a liking of poetry, too.

Are you looking for more things to add to your creative writing toolkit, you can find some here.

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